The Private Ambition of a Very Public Man

From his boarding school days to the grind of the campaign trail, John F. Kerry has worn his ambition like a badge -- almost always on display, yet rarely acknowledged. Over the course of a carefully crafted public life brimming with accomplishment and wrenched by war and loss, he has discreetly kept his distant prize, the presidency, in clear sight.

Great expectations have hovered at almost every step.

As a Yale University senior, Kerry posed for his 1966 yearbook with his eyes cast in a far-off gaze, the studious figure of a serious young man on the rise. Political science major, winner of oratory prizes, debating champ, student government leader -- the impressive resume beneath his graduation portrait forecast a promising future.

He won election as president of the Yale Political Union by lobbying and cutting deals, working his dorm room phone like a seasoned Boston pol. Classmates serenaded him with kazoo renditions of “Hail to the Chief” and teased him as “Mr. President.” Fun-loving enough to laugh at himself, the young John Forbes Kerry chimed in by mocking the initials he conspicuously shared with his role model, President John F. Kennedy.

Kerry’s intimates have long recognized his propulsive drive toward political success. Over the years, he has sometimes let his guard slip, blurting admissions of presidential yearning. But more often, Kerry shied from the topic, limiting his confidences to trusted friends and aides, referring dutifully to public service, as Kennedy had.

“The idea of being president is just not something he talked about easily or directly,” said Dan Barbiero, a St. Paul’s School and Yale roommate who has remained close to Kerry. “When we teased him about it, there was always a point where he’d sort of chafe at it. He’d say, ‘Aw, c’mon.’ That was the signal to lay off.”

A worldly, energetic and at times lonely teenager who stood out from languid prep school mates in New Hampshire, Kerry received an early political education. Influenced by his parents’ liberal Democratic leanings, he gravitated toward a public life after several storied chance encounters with JFK, whose soaring rhetoric and easy grace he tried to emulate.

Kerry’s youthful immersion into politics and his fast footwork when opportunities arose would leave him vulnerable to critics’ charges that he was relentlessly on the make, a camera-seeking striver mocked years later by rivals as “Live Shot.”

“The guy’s about as shameless a self-promoter as you’ll find anywhere in politics,” said Peter Blute, a Boston radio host and former congressman who worked against Kerry as a Republican campaign aide in the 1984 Massachusetts Senate race.

But Kerry’s consuming drive has been tempered and detoured by personal and political loss -- the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam’s steep toll on cherished pals, his first election comeuppance, the disintegration of his first marriage.

“It’s obviously a moving, hugely impacting portion of your life when you lose some of your very best friends in the world and when you’re nearly killed yourself,” Kerry said in an interview this year about the war’s lasting presence in his life. “It’s not who I am, but it’s still a part of me.”

Through it all, his inner political pilot light never winked out. “I think some of it’s genetics,” mused his younger brother, Cameron, a Boston lawyer and Kerry’s closest advisor throughout his electoral career. “It’s basically hard-wired into him. We’re a political family, and we all grew up pretty argumentative. But even as a kid, he took it to another level.”

The building blocks of Kerry’s political education were set out for him at an early age. He and his brother and two sisters, Peggy and Diana, acclimated to a transient household that trailed after their father’s Washington and European diplomatic postings. Dinner table arguments and heated political discussions were family rites. Scratchy recordings of Winston Churchill speeches introduced Kerry to the lofty cadences of classic oratory.

From their mother, Rosemary Forbes, the Kerry kids were taught “propriety and respect for others,” Diana Kerry said. Recalled by friends as warm and gracious, she was a descendant of Massachusetts founder John Winthrop.

Richard Kerry was a more austere presence: a brooding, cerebral career diplomat who chafed under the State Department’s 1950s-era Cold War brinkmanship. He was the son of Frederick Kerry, an Austrian Jewish emigrant merchant originally named Fritz Kohn, who committed suicide by handgun in a Boston hotel men’s room in 1921. John Kerry only learned the details of the dark episode -- and his Jewish ancestry -- last year from a Boston Globe team researching him.

A World War II test pilot, Richard Kerry imbued his son with a love of flight, navigation and sailing -- and an enduring allegiance to the Democratic Party and its modern patriarch, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Kerry’s father had met FDR at Warm Springs, Ga., where both Roosevelt and Richard Kerry’s sister, Mildred, were treated for polio. A guest at FDR’s 1932 inauguration, Richard Kerry treasured his official invitation years later -- just as his son would proudly show off photos of his encounters with JFK.

Diana Kerry recalls her older brother “handing out buttons” for Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson around their Washington neighborhood as early as 1952. But it was the 1960 Kennedy election that electrified him.

By then, John Kerry was at St. Paul’s School in Concord, N.H., after a whirlwind tour of Europe and a lonely stint in a Swiss boarding school that left him with the ability to swear in Italian, French and German. Kerry still describes the haunting images that gave him jolts of the world’s harshness: a forbidden bicycle ride through the gray cityscape of Communist East Berlin, a stroll with his father on Normandy beaches past Nazi bunkers rotted since D-day. “When you’re a young kid, you can imagine what it tells you about war,” he said.

Back in the U.S. at St. Paul’s, a British-influenced academy where sons of affluence wore coats and ties and addressed schoolmasters as “Sir,” Kerry stood out and apart, uncool. Barbiero met him at low ebb, warned by their school housemaster that young Kerry worried that “people don’t like him.” Energetic and pint-sized until a late teenage growth spurt, the boy found outlets on the hockey team and in debate jousts.

He spoke out for JFK at a school political contest in 1960. “It was natural for a serious kid like John to go for Kennedy. He was an attractive young leader in a world where everybody else in government seemed so old,” said John Shattuck, who was Kerry’s debate partner then and now heads the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation.

The youth’s JFK fixation swelled to hero worship days before the November election. He wandered into a crowded election-eve campaign rally at the smoky Boston Garden, returning to St. Paul’s intoxicated by Kennedy’s sparkling lines.

“He had this sense of ‘if he could capture it, maybe I could do it too,’ ” said Cam Kerry, who considers that moment the point when politics came alive for his brother.

Two summers later, on his way to Yale, Kerry met his idol in person. Invited in August 1962 to call on Janet Auchincloss, a half sister of the president’s wife, Jackie, Kerry met Kennedy at her family’s Newport, R.I., estate. There was a brief exchange about Yale and Harvard, Kennedy’s alma mater. Then Kerry joined JFK for a sail on a Coast Guard yawl. A month later, the star-struck teen met him again in Newport at an America’s Cup yacht race.

That fall, Kerry came to Yale showing off photos of Kennedy relaxing on a boat deck, joined by a lanky, long-jawed teenager squinting into the sun. “John wanted to be Jack Kennedy. There was no question, even then, that he wanted to lead,” recalled Yale roommate and lifelong friend Harvey Bundy.

Bundy did not share Kerry’s JFK enthusiasm -- even though his uncles, McGeorge and William Bundy, served as hawkish foreign policy aides to Kennedy.

Kerry and Harvey Bundy had met during a Kennedy event on the New Haven Green. Bundy joined classmates in heckling what he considered a “hack speech.” Kerry “rushed over to make me stop.” Offended, Kerry later dashed off a letter to the White House, apologizing “for the deplorable behavior of some of [his] fellow undergraduates.”

But Kerry, Bundy and Barbiero, Kerry’s buddy from St. Paul’s, joined as roommates into a tight, antic camaraderie. While Bundy and Barbiero cocooned and studied, Kerry raced in and out all day like a harried firefighter, always off to hockey practice or a debate.

He only slowed down during the aftermath of Kennedy’s November 1963 assassination. Bundy recalls Kerry sitting, ashen-faced, inches from their black-and-white TV, watching until the last funeral rites concluded days later. “The only time he spoke up was to name every administration official and world leader who passed by the cameras,” Bundy said.

Kerry recovered by throwing himself into campus political life, dragging Bundy and Barbiero along as sidekicks. He joined the Political Union, the school’s student government, as a member of the Liberal Party, and quickly became its leader.

Among Kerry’s rivals were campus conservatives George E. Pataki, now New York’s governor, and J. Harvie Wilkinson III, now chief judge of the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Charlottesville, Va. Kerry became president in his junior year by lobbying Wilkinson to support him in return for his backing the next year.

“John got him in a corner somewhere and wore him down,” recalled Lanny J. Davis, who reported on the union’s activities for the Yale Daily News and later was an aide to President Clinton. “He was a powerfully persuasive guy.”

George W. Bush was also on campus by Kerry’s junior year, but he spurned the Republican club, preferring the fraternity party scene at the Delta Kappa Epsilon house. Kerry had only a passing awareness of Bush, classmates say -- despite some accounts that the future rivals once argued over whether busing should be used to integrate schools.

Inside Kerry’s dorm room, bull sessions about campus politics segued into musings about his charmed future. The tone was lighthearted, but the subject was earnest, recalled Bundy’s wife, Blakely, then his steady girlfriend. They pictured a Kerry White House, wondering which Cabinet posts each of them might get.

“There were joking discussions and John would laugh along with us,” she recalls. “He was saying by then he was going into politics and he knew what the road was. We certainly told him he could be president. And he never tried to talk us out of it.”

Their charades had historic lineage. For two centuries, American voters have rewarded ambitious men with the presidency while allowing them to blur the primal, hard-boiled nature of their quests.

Historian Richard Shenkman, author of “Presidential Ambition,” an account of the interior urges that spurred presidents toward the White House, said the delicate dance originates with George Washington’s voiced reluctance to take on the mantle of the first presidency.

“It’s planted in the early soil of the republic,” Shenkman said. “Candidates and voters both play this game of deniability. We want ambitious people in charge because otherwise we get lethargic government. But we’re also suspicious of the ambitious. So candidates talk loftily about public service and voters pretend to buy it. It’s one of the great compacts of our public life.”

By his senior year, Kerry had progressed from playing at politics to seeking out contacts. When Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey came to New Haven to talk to a group of antiwar town mayors in late 1965, Kerry showed up with a petition in support of the Vietnam escalation.

He often commuted to Washington, strolling into Capitol offices to snag celebrated campus speakers. Among those he escorted onto campus were New York Mayor John V. Lindsay and conservative thinker and former congresswoman Clare Booth Luce. “I was amazed how many senators knew him,” said Cam Kerry, who tagged along on one Washington trip.

Kerry’s rising profile brought him notice at Skull and Bones, Yale’s exclusive secret society, which two years later also welcomed Bush. As a senior, Kerry was tapped to join, coming in with two close friends, Richard Pershing and David Thorne.

Pershing, grandson of the famed World War I Gen. John “Black Jack” Pershing, was a suave socialite; Thorne was a fellow boarding school refugee whose sister, Julia, soon began dating Kerry. She would become his first wife and they would have two daughters, Alexandra and Vanessa, in the 1970s.

Kerry “was a natural,” said Shattuck, who preceded him into Bones. “I talked to other members about getting him in. He was a dynamic member of Yale’s political world, and deserved to get in on merit.”

Pershing brought out Kerry’s merry side, taking him along with his crowd on Manhattan club crawls and hockey excursions.

Renny Scott, another Political Union member, recalls a Kerry antic in a darkened New Haven movie theater: As the film rolled, he pretended to strip a bath towel away from an on-screen actress “in a really bad Western. He brought down the house.”

Their carefree nights were short-lived. The Vietnam War machine was accelerating, and graduates had to make pained decisions. Kerry, Pershing and Thorne enlisted as officers. Their motivations were complex: a mixture of familial history, upper-crust duty and adventurism. Kerry had a deeper layer of considerations.

On an earlier trip to Yale, William P. Bundy had joined his nephew, Harvey, and Kerry and Barbiero over beers in their dorm room. The foreign policy aide to President Lyndon B. Johnson urged them to take an active role in the war by becoming military officers. Kerry responded to the appeal. But his rosy view of the war had changed by graduation. He had become skeptical of escalating U.S. involvement, telling fellow debater Bradford Snell that the war had become their generation’s defining issue -- and that he needed to see Vietnam firsthand.

“He said he wanted to be able to talk about the war later on in some kind of public forum,” Snell said. “He never said outright that it was politics. But what amazed me was that he was willing to put his life on the line to do it.”

In Navy training and then in the Mekong Delta war zone, Kerry dropped clearer hints about the future he envisioned for himself. James Onorato, a bunkmate aboard the missile frigate Gridley, told the Chicago Tribune this year that Kerry had confided then that his “primary goal was to be a senator and then go for the big shot, the presidency.”

Months later, in the wardroom of a barracks boat docked at a Mekong Delta base, Kerry told several Swift boat officers swapping “pictures of ... kids and wives” that he was on “the same journey as John F. Kennedy,” recalled Bill Shumadine, a fellow officer who admired Kerry’s medal-winning exploits but later came to resent his postwar peace activism. “He talked about going home a hero and running for president. Our reaction was, ‘Yeah, right.’ They seemed pretty big steps.”

In letters to some college mates, Kerry was also looking ahead. He wrote to Barbiero, then a Marine officer in Vietnam, that he was thinking about attending law school.

But Kerry’s return was anticlimactic, his immediate future deferred. Old friends were gone. Dick Pershing was dead, slain in a Viet Cong rocket attack. So were other prep school and college classmates, as well as Navy pals like Don Droz, caught in a fatal Swift boat ambush.

As their deaths weighed on him, Kerry channeled his anguish into political activism.

Stationed stateside as a Navy aide in Brooklyn in late 1969, Kerry asked his brother to see if the time was right to mount an antiwar campaign for Congress in Massachusetts. Cam Kerry, then a Harvard student and peace worker, had already pinpointed a pro-war Democrat, Phil Philbin, as vulnerable. Angling for support, Cam talked his way into an envelope factory owned by antiwar fundraiser Jerome Grossman.

“He kept talking about this special brother he had,” Grossman recalled. “This brother was embarking on a great political career, and he wanted my support.”

But Grossman did not commit to Kerry. He backed the Rev. Robert F. Drinan, an antiwar stalwart who was then dean of Boston College’s law school and the favorite among several liberal candidates vying to challenge Philbin. “John rushed in, but the train had already left the station,” Drinan recalled with a laugh. “Typical of John, that didn’t stop him.”

When Kerry and his small band of supporters crammed into a Harvard University hall in February 1970, he quickly sized up Drinan’s winning hand and pulled out of the race with a magnanimous speech. Drinan won that year, embarking on a long career in Congress. Kerry had to wait.

A yearlong stint as an organizer for antiwar veterans gave Kerry a national perch. But it also led to the hubris of his disastrous first congressional race in 1972, when blue-collar voters dismissed his antiwar platform.

A dispirited decade in political exile followed. Kerry worked his way back methodically -- in law school, a prosecutor’s job, even selling cookies. K. Dun Gifford, a veteran Kennedy hand and Kerry’s partner in a successful cookie company, recalls Kerry’s “shell-shocked days.”

“He was directionless,” Gifford said. “He’d go out to these brutal dinners with [Sen.] Ted Kennedy and other politicos and they’d all tell him the same thing: ‘You were licked, and it’s good to get licked.’ He didn’t get it then. He does now.”

Kerry also contended with his wife’s bouts of depression and its strain on their marriage. The couple divorced in 1988, and both remarried. Kerry’s second wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, now accompanies him on the campaign trail.

He made a fresh electoral start in 1982, running tough and winning campaigns as Massachusetts lieutenant governor, then senator. A short-lived flirtation in 2000 as a vice presidential prospect for Gore flickered out. But by the following spring, Kerry was on the verge of mounting the long-deferred presidential campaign he hopes to energize this week during his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Boston.

In March 2001, shortly after he decided to run, Kerry flew to Key Largo, Fla., for a Bundy family wedding. Before the ceremony began at the posh Ocean Reef Club, Kerry and Barbiero huddled at a front table. The two men talked in the elusive code of old friends who had something weighty on their minds.

“You think you’re going to do this?” Barbiero finally pressed.

“Yeah, I think so,” Kerry said.

The answer was qualified, but Barbiero sensed his old friend’s readiness at last. “It was John finally saying, ‘It’s time.’ ”